Fantasy Publics : The Reductive Mythology of Social Media

Abstract

Inspired by the dramatic 2006 rebellion of Facebook users against the now accepted feature that automatically feeds live updates from all of a user's friends, the author argues that while “at first glance, Facebook's apparent encouragement of discourse, as well as its ability to bring large numbers of individual subjects together in user-created groups, seem to fulfill the criteria of the idealized publics of bourgeois society first elucidated by Jiirgen Habermas in 1962, …in actuality, this is far from the case. Despite the prolific and heterogeneous character of inter-subject communications facilitated by Facebook, the medium ultimately proves itself to be little more than the latest manifestation of the shift toward non-reflective, uncritical consumption of culture described by Habermas….Information disseminated through Facebook operates in a closed cycle, characterized by a fleeting life span, and a swift death at the hands of ever-shorter memory spans. Jean Baudrillard refers to it as a process of implosion.”